Social progress in Britain

How are we doing as a society? Are things getting better or worse for people living in the UK? We explore trends over time on several of the key indicators of social progress. Click on the below links ...

Inequalities

How are we doing as a society when it come to inequalities? Are the social divisions of class, gender and ethnicity still as important as ever?
Are there gender gaps in pay, experiences of crime, unemployment, ...

Brexit Project

From 1st May 2017 for a period of 18 months, CSI has a new project: Fixed, Crystallising or Diverging: Attitude formation and change in the run-up to Brexit. This project is funded by the Economic and ...

A new article on Brexit has been published online today in Political Quarterly. The article, by Lindsay Richards, Anthony Heath and Noah Carl, presents evidence of attitudinal types that map neatly onto the two opposing ideals of hard and soft Brexit. The hard Brexit view is defined by issues that eurosceptics […]

New research carried out at the Centre for Social Investigation, which analyses the impact of National Citizen Service (NCS) on 16-17 year olds from a range of backgrounds and geographic groups, has been published. The Research by James Laurence (University of Manchester), who was Research Fellow at CSI last year. The report is an […]

22nd February 2018 Welcome to the Centre for Social Investigation eNewsletter. New Research We have published several new short articles on the drivers of Brexit-related preferences. A new briefing note, by Noah Carl, on the role of national identity showed that people who see themselves primarily as “English” were […]

Declining social cohesion is sometimes seen as an inevitable and lamentable side effect of modernization. Modern societies are more geographically mobile than in the past perhaps bringing about changes in the way people within neighbourhoods relate to each other. Growing economic inequality is thought to have brought about greater ‘social […]

The issue of sovereignty lies at the heart of the debate over Britain’s membership of the EU. According to Lord Ashcroft’s referendum-day poll, the most commonly cited reason for voting Leave was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be made in the UK”. Likewise, when respondents in the […]

Although growing foodbank use in Britain has been widely reported, pointing towards an escalating public health crisis, there is still much debate over the exact extent of their use. A new study published today in BMC Public Health looks to explore repeat foodbank use, a key evidence gap in our […]

Welcome to the Centre for Social Investigation eNewsletter, published 7th November 2017. You can download this newsletter as a pdf file. New Research Our Brexit project is well under way, with three short reports published since our last update. The first report is a review of the evidence so far: […]

The so called “divorce bill” or “exit bill” has featured prominently in the Brexit news recently. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has stated that we must first agree on how to calculate the final settlement amount before progress can be made in the negotiations, and has described the talks […]

The heated nature of the public discourse around Brexit suggests that the British public are not in a compromising mood, but is there evidence to back this up? We set out to discover what people think about the various aspects of the EU negotiations. Where are people more willing to […]

CSI is pleased to release a new report, written by Noah Carl, that reviews the evidence on what sort of Brexit deal the British public wants. It does not argue for or against any particular Brexit deal, but rather aims to demarcate the various options on the table, and to […]